Earlier this 12 months, the open source AI code community and the corporate Hugging facebased in Brooklyn, New York, caused a stir with the announcement that it will hire a former robotics engineer from Tesla's Optimus program to guide its recent project – an open-source robotics program called “Le Robot.”
Today, engineer Remi Cadene from Paris, France, posted on X A video showing what appears to be the primary working humanoid robot from Hugging Face's Le Robot program.
The robot is known as “Reachy2” and is a humanoid robot that was Pollen Roboticsone other open-source robotics company based in Bordeaux, France, that collaborated with Hugging Face to coach the robot to perform various household chores and safely interact with people and dogs.
In a direct message to VentureBeat via X, Cadene explained the novel training process behind Reachy2 in additional detail, clarifying that the robot was initially “remotely controlled” by a human wearing a virtual reality headset who controlled it because it performed various tasks, including placing cups on a dish rack and safely and easily handing an apple or other object to an individual.
Then a machine learning algorithm examined 50 Videos of teleoperation sessions in VR, each lasting about 15 seconds, before learning to perform different tasks independently, guiding Reachy2. Each video is related to a unique sensor within the Reachy2 robot. After 40,000 and 60,000 training steps, Reachy2 has learned to rotate a hand and an apple and return to its original position.
“We have open sourced this dataset on Hugging Face with Pollen Robotics, in addition to the model we trained and used for the demo,” Cadene wrote to us on X.
The The dataset is offered here usable by everyone. “The same thing could be done at home with smaller robots,” he posted publicly on X.
The move to open source advanced robotics AI comes at a time when the event and funding of useful robotics outside of labs and industrial settings is usually increasing. Companies like Figure and Cobot have collectively raised a whole lot of tens of millions to use recent machine learning concepts like LLMs (in Figure's case, OpenAI's models) to the realm of physical robots that may interact with humans and their environments.
Hugging Face's “Le Robot” is prone to put pressure on competing robotics vendors because the corporate is basically offering the technology – at the least the robot brain – without cost by sharing open source robotics code in its community and on Github.
A heavenly robot connection
When asked how the collaboration between Hugging Face's Le Robot team and Pollen Robotics got here about, Cadene told VentureBeat that it was a natural alliance because of geographic proximity and overlap in research interests.
“We closely follow the work of Pollen Robotics and are enthusiastic about their robots,” wrote Cadene. “We were searching for humanoid robots. They were searching for end-to-end training software. So the collaboration between Pollen with their robot Reachy and Hugging Face with LeRobot was quite natural, especially since they’re two hours away from our (Le Robot) laboratory in Paris, so we only visited them for a couple of days.”
Pollen Robotics has an extended history of developing accessible and open-source technologies for real-world applications. The company began in 2013 with Poppy, which it claims is the primary open-source 3D-printed humanoid robot designed for research purposes.
Since then, Pollen Robotics has been dedicated to developing open source, open science and open data products, collaborating with scientists, artists and innovators to explore recent uses and make the robotics revolution accessible to all.
Its flagship product, Reachy 1, is an open-source robot with full teleoperability that starts at $9,750 (€8,990). available in various configurations including the Reachy Full Kit + Mobile Base for $43,500 (€39,990), the Reachy Full Kit for $30,500 (€27,990), the Reachy Starter Kit for $21,800 (€19,990) and the Reachy Arm Kit for $10,900 (€9,990).
It is great at interacting with people and manipulating objects, and comes with ready-made AI and modular robotics to power any real-world application.
Pollen Robotics can be committed to moral practices. It ensures that its technologies are accessible to anyone under open source licenses, creates durable and repairable products, and rejects military funding. It offers significant discounts and free services to open source projects that protect the environment.
Reachy 2 is coming “soon,” in line with Pollen Robotics’ website, and is alleged to represent “a large step forward,” with “completely recent bio-inspired arms with 7 degrees of freedom (3 kg payload each),” meaning it has arms with seven degrees of freedom (DoF), identical to humanswhich may each carry about six kilos at a time.
VentureBeat has reached out to Pollen Robotics for more information on Reachy 2 and the collaboration with Hugging Face's Le Robot and can update you once we hear back.
